​Flor y canto para nuestros tiempos
(al modo nahua)

By Rafael Jesús González

La flor y canto que nos llega
es desarraigado --
         se marchitan las flores,
                  se desgarran las plumas,
                          se desmorona el oro,
                                    se quiebra el jade.
No importa que tan denso el humo de copal,
         cuantos los corazones ofrendados,
se desarraigan los mitos,
         mueren los dioses.
Tratamos de salvarlos
de las aguas oscuras del pasado
con anzuelos frágiles
forjados de imaginación y anhelo.
Dentro llevamos voces mixtas --
abuelas, abuelos
conquistados y conquistadores
         — nuestro legado.
De él tenemos que escoger lo preciso,
         lo negro, lo rojo,
cultivar nuestras propias flores,
cantar nuestros propios cantos,
recoger plumas nuevas para adornarnos,
oro para formarnos el rostro,
buscar jade para labrarnos el corazón --
sólo así crearemos el nuevo mundo.

​Flower & Song for Our Times
            (in the Nahua mode)
  
The flower & Song that come to us
is uprooted --
          flowers wither,
                    feathers tear,
                             gold crumbles,
                                       jade breaks.
It matters not how thick the incense smoke,
           how many the hearts offered,
myths are uprooted,
           the gods die.
We try to save them
from the dark waters of the past
with fragile hooks
forged of imagination & longing.
Within we carry mixed voices --
grandmothers, grandfathers
conquered & conquerors
          — our legacy.
From it we have to choose the necessary,
          the black & the red,
grow our own flowers,
sing our own songs,
gather new feathers to adorn ourselves,
discover new gold to form our face,
seek jade to carve our hearts --
only thus can we create the new world.

​Por/By Sylvia Eugenia

Meintren tegas a las botayas something something (we will live with the bottle until we die with the bottle.)
My mom had whiskey for the first time at nine; "tu flaca,” a Catholic martyr in the making in Managua. We had more in common that skin would tell.
“aww, who’s this cabvrona?!”
So, the conversation happens and my brain starts.
I could try to talk about my fathers’ fathers’ father in Syria, offer up some patriarchal evidence of who this body is made up of. I would be telling a blood truth; but, nothing in me exists attached to that country or custom or people. I could talk about kibby, silt-coffee, un-filtered cigarettes; what is to be a man. My primary leaned lesson from that truth was not talking about “it.” By “it,” I mean, anything, like, ever.
But, let's set aside a part of that part of skin steeped in side-stepping emotions and focus on the Pisces. By that, I mean, the woman. The female, the femme. The bruja of us. The emotional from us. I’ll conjour the grit of the saintly body that takes up the most space in me. My mother.
I will tell you about mi mama, deliver my cred. Mira, I am the “simberguensa” crying crocodile tears that will never, could never suffer enough or know what real suffering was like.
I’ll tell you about this potty mouth “chavala” that would cause my mother to gasp dramatically (inhale)
“Que vulgarite, que vulgar”
This is a story from the outside of an insider. Pero, an assimilated gordita. Por supuesto blanco, that is.
Que?!
I haven’t a clue
I speak Spanish poorly, comprehend it fairly and understand it from the warm rain coming through pores. I agonize over this, I abide by this, I lose myself. I instinctually, move forward with the cross.
My cross is only second hand but still holds like brand new. Thorns and nails are upkept to fashion my own contemporary guilt.
Self-torture and my ability to say words that I didn’t even know existed on my tongue.
“Aye dios” without a second thought” has turned into “aye dios; fuhckkkk”
A Central American mujer walks away to suffer in silence as the Middle Eastern man stays to have the final say.
Look at me, my everything “all nalgas peladas”
This is my body, mi corazon, for all to see.
Es mi vida.

​Sylvia Eugenia combines elements of fiction and memoir into a prose poetry.
Her poems have no structure except, the pauses in her breath and metronome of her heartbeat.
She graduated from Mills College, Oakland, California, with a BA in English, with an emphasis in Creative Writing. She has presented her work at many small readings in Southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2013, she performed at Beast Crawl in Oakland and Lit. Crawl in San Francisco. She lives in Santa Cruz, Cali.